Why the secrecy?

December 28, 2013Letters to the Editor

Proposals are being received for the purchase of Sunnyview Nursing and Rehabilitation Center and we, the taxpayers who own Sunnyview, are being kept in the dark.

In the Dec. 18 meeting of the county Board of Commissioners, Solicitor Mike English advised the commissioners to make no comment on the names of the prospective buyers or the amount of their bids. Pretense for the secrecy being that such disclosures would harm negotiations. This assumption is clearly the mere opinion of Solicitor English, who is building a record of always withholding information and censoring ideas from the public.

Ominously we have repeatedly been advised that the commissioners need not accept the highest bid.

Deliberations of the various offers must be held in a public meeting but it is unclear if that meeting would be a commissioners public meeting or any public meeting where the deliberations could be tacked on to the agenda. English also specified on the 18th that a quorum for such a meeting would be two commissioners.

Itzi Meztli, in his Dec. 19 letter to the Butler Eagle, questioned the logic of the county giving $4.75 million to Butler County Community College when BC3 has a surplus fund of more than $16 million. Meztli is an academic whom I know well. He and I both support BC3 but he is right to question what seem to be misplaced priorities. BC3 is no longer a fledgling institution — it is a thriving, expanding enterprise that we will continue to support but not at the cost of losing an asset such as Sunnyview.

My husband, David Kerr, in his Dec. 18 letter to the Eagle questioned whether a proper accounting of Sunnyview’s value is being made. We do not know and we will not know until we are surprised by a quick sale to an unknown buyer.

There are unanswered questions and apparently all the commissioners will provide as answers is, “No comment.”